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Officials with the San Diego Mayor's Office and the San Diego Chargers moved closer to an agreement on building a downtown football stadium Monday even as the team suggested that a public vote on how to pay for it may slip several months to spring 2013.

In a joint statement, Mayor Jerry Sanders and Chargers owner Dean Spanos announced the team would not pay the city nearly $24 million to break its lease and move to another city this year. Each year until 2020, from Feb. 1 through May 1, the team is able to relocate by paying San Diego a fee that decreases about $2 million to $3 million a year.

An announcement that the team would stay had seemed inevitable for months as momentum behind competing Los Angeles stadium plans slowed, leaving the Chargers nowhere to go.

But Monday's joint statement and an accompanying one from Chargers' special counsel Mark Fabiani did suggest something new: That both sides are on the same page again after months of brinksmanship.

Spokesmen for Sanders and Spanos have publicly pushed separate stadium ideas for some time, but Fabiani said Monday that the team would table its plan for a stadium that doubles as convention center space in hopes of finding common ground. He said the team's proposal could be revived if Sanders' convention center expansion falters.

Despite Fabiani's repeated assertions that shared stadium and convention uses a) are practical and b) provide the best way to finance a new stadium (via higher hotel room taxes), Sanders has long maintained that a convention center expansion should proceed separately from stadium construction six blocks away on an East Village bus yard.

In a nod to Sanders' preferred way to pay for a new stadium (via regional participation from San Diego county government and perhaps even SANDAG), the statement from him and Spanos said, "Both the Mayor’s Office and the Chargers look forward to continuing their joint efforts to build a multi-use stadium that will benefit the entire region."

In a statement framed as a Q and A, Fabiani said it remains unclear how to pay for a possible $1 billion stadium but both sides still agree the East Village site is the best option.

He added: “The Chargers are going to continue what we have been doing now for quite some time now: Work cooperatively with the Mayor throughout the remainder of his term on stadium solutions that are mutually acceptable to the team and to the Mayor.”

In an interview, Sanders reiterated his resistance to include a tax increase in a stadium plan. In part because Sanders’ push for a temporary sales tax increase failed miserably at the ballot box last year, he has told his New York stadium consultants to find other funding sources.

“This is not about a tax increase,” Sanders said Monday. “We made it very clear to Lazard we are not going on the ballot for a tax increase because that’s simply not going to happen. You don’t have to hit me in the head with a hammer twice.”

Sanders leaves office this year because of term limits, and both he and the Chargers have continually said they want the public to vote on a stadium financing plan in November, his last full month in office. A plan, which could involve hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, could be ready for public review by March.

Fabiani's suggestion Monday that a referendum on the plan might slide to a special election in the spring of 2013 marked the first time either he or the mayor has publicly proposed leaving the project in the hands of a new San Diego mayor.

The race to replace Sanders features four high-profile candidates Democrat Rep. Bob Filner and Republicans Councilman Carl DeMaio, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis and Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher. Their views on the stadium and the convention center will take on greater importance if either project fails to advance under Sanders.

In another statement released Monday, influential union leader Lorena Gonzalez, secretary-treasurer of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, said she is "generally supportive" of both projects, but that they must benefit local workers.

“To ensure the community a return on its investment, we believe there must be a written agreement requiring the use of local workers on those projects along with training opportunities in the construction trades for our city’s unemployed," she said.

For now, Fabiani said, the team is acknowledging that its stadium-convention center proposal is on the shelf.

"We understand that the mayor and other city leaders have decided to push forward with the existing convention center plan," he said. "Effectively, this means that our joint stadium-convention center proposal will be deferred for the time being, as decisions are made about how the existing convention center expansion proposal will move forward.

"If, for reasons completely unrelated to the Chargers, the existing convention center expansion plan fails, we hope that at that time City leaders will give our joint stadium-convention center expansion proposal a good, hard second look," he added.

Fabiani closed his statement with the suggestion that a public vote could occur in 2013, something that is important for several reasons. For starters, the delay would give the Chargers a chance to get its fanbase fired up by a playoff run. It would also move the measure to a ballot that didn't include votes on tax increases and a range of candidates.

On the other side, a standalone special election would be expensive to the city. In the most recent estimate in September 2011 for what such a referendum would cost, the City Clerk's Office said between $3.1 million and $3.7 million for a 10-page measure.

Here's what Fabiani said on the topic: "And if for some reason we miss the November ballot deadline, we need to be ready to consider alternatives, such as a special election in the Spring of 2013 - right after the Chargers win the Super Bowl!"

San Diego U-T columnist Nick Canepa first reported that the Chargers had officially decided against triggering the early-termination clause in the team's lease in Monday's newspaper.

The Sanders/Spanos statement in its entirety is below:

The City of San Diego and the Chargers continue to work closely together to explore publicly acceptable ways to build a Super Bowl-quality stadium on the bus maintenance yard site in the East Village of downtown San Diego. To give this ongoing process every chance to succeed, the Chargers have announced that the team will not trigger the lease’s termination clause in 2012. Both the Mayor’s Office and the Chargers look forward to continuing their joint efforts to build a multi-use stadium that will benefit the entire region.